New Rule: All Aspiring U.S. Vice Presidents Must Pass The Judith Chalmers Test

Paddy Briggs, at Blogger News Network:

Dear Sarah Palin

I hope that you will see this open letter from the United Kingdom – to help you it’s the island just off the west coast of Europe – as it isn’t clear whether you have ever been here. Or anywhere much else outside the US of A for that matter. Maybe you have been able to travel without a Passport – I do hope so because the thought of a prospective President of the United States who at the age of 44 hasn’t felt the need to see the world outside of your national borders is a wee bit scary.

Actually, if she’s not been to Britain, Gov Palin has evidently been to Germany and Kuwait professionally. Although there appears a possible post-election impeachment issue brewing over whether she did more in Ireland than transit through the country. However, that’s understandable, given that her not having chosen to spend a week or so in a Ballina B&B must certainly call into fundamental question her vice presidential credentials.

You may say that as a Brit without a vote I should just leave all these things American to you and your fellow citizens. That would be OK if you were standing for election in Bulgaria, or Botswana or even Brazil – and certainly Alaska. But you are not. You are standing to be elected to a position that could really quite likely see you as the leader of the free world. That’s the world that I live in as well.

Funny, but this blog had never previously considered it necessary to ponder on Messrs Cameron and Brown’s pre-party leadership wanderings throughout the Ozarks, Detroit and Sioux Falls. Yet one wonders suddenly how, absent their having experienced them when on holiday, they can possibly hope to relate to Amuricans? Indeed, I live in their world, too, and yet no one seems to feel my views ought to be of any consequence whatsoever when it comes to their decisions?

More importantly, though, we are learning here that, lacking a “draft” issue (well, 3/4 of the two tickets appear to) this time around, both presidential tickets should instead submit signed affidavits regarding their pre-office seeking, lifetime travel history? Hmmm, that latter makes for quite a change. After all, a major concern a few months back was whether Sen McCain happened really to be a “natural born” American.

That said, yours truly has been living here in the U.K. for 10 years, and has been all over Europe, as well as to Africa and Oceania. I have seen more places outside of the U.S. that I can ever hope to recall. Undoubtedly, such travels will likely smooth my own path to the White House someday.

For one thing, they will surely lead to rating an endorsement from the likes of Mr Briggs. However, as to what all those BA miles will be worth more generally when media immediately discovers the Wife does not hold a U.S. passport? Perhaps her Keira Knightley impersonation will get us off that hook?

But we are pondering here, remember, about someone else’s pending VP-run. As goes an old witticism from these parts in noting the painfully obvious, “Hey, is the Pope a Catholic? Does Judith Chalmers have a passport?” There was a time one could travel North America without a passport, and that this blog understands (even if some appear not to) that North America is larger and more varied geographically, and in some respects also culturally, than is the European Union, is certainly irrelevant. What matters more is that Sen Obama has done “the grand tour”:

Is there such a thing as the “world community”? Well yes I think that there is – and that community has a diversity that I would hope anyone presumptuous enough to be a heartbeat from the presidency would take seriously and would have studied. We are not some poor relation of Uncle Sam these days you know – even though we know that if Uncle Sam has a head cold we might shiver a bit ourselves. Senator Obama went down well on his recent trip to Europe and though he is a loyal and patriotic American his very parenthood shows that he has a hinterland. Do you?…

That last point is worth highlighting. Interestingly, we had discovered also just prior to his “recent trip to Europe” that our “hinterland”-possessing Sen Obama happened to possess a surprising lack of geographical knowledge regarding the national location of Auschwitz. Presumably, his (how many hours’ long?) London stopover cleared that up. Thank goodness, when here, nobody asked him, on camera, to pronounce “The Isles of Scilly.”

Never mind, for “hinterland” is obviously the word of the week. Yet that observation from Mr Briggs itself shows how the perspectives on “hinterlands” differ. For instance, while he “went down well” here, Sen Obama’s journey to Europe apparently did not go down nearly as “well” in much of the U.S.

And why might that have been so? Could that have had something to do with the fact that Mr Briggs has his “hinterlands” backwards? For “hinterland” is generally understood in its root form to describe the rural environs enveloping and outside the “flashy metro area”:

Assuming it can then be distilled down to the personal, though, Sen Obama might well be said actually to have no singular “defining area” that is clearly paramount in his personal development. However, parentage has little to do with it. Put another way, if Gov Palin’s “hinterland” is Alaska, his is Kenya? Or is it Kansas? Or perhaps Hawaii? Or, come to think of it, Chicago? Or maybe his is the last year and a half on the global Silk Road, running for president?

If one hadn’t noticed before, one sensed that lack of grounding in him not only when we learned that he had a church pastor whom he professed to know well yet apparently didn’t know that well, but when we also witnessed his trying to cope with the mindboggling issue of what one does with a bowling ball. Actually, “of no fixed address” would seemingly be a far more apt description for Sen Obama. In that, Gov Palin is almost his complete opposite, and is perhaps even a bit too “hinterland.” Just ask the moose heads we hear are mounted over her fireplace.

But apparently Gov Palin’s is the wrong sort of “hinterland” for Mr Briggs’s taste. Britain, after all, lacks wild moose (the occasional pit-bull is about the most confrontational non-human mammal present), and Mr Briggs seems to feel no desire to get to understand hers (meaning her “hinterland,” not her “wild moose”). She is, however, supposed to be all wildly interested in his.

If you care for America’s place in the world can you put that place into perspective because you have seen a fair bit of the world that provides the context? Or are your reference points purely American reference points? If they are then I am sorry Mrs Palin it just isn’t good enough. Of course any elected official in high office must care first of all for the people that placed them there. But America has always had an international perspective – it comes from the Roosevelts, the Eisenhowers, the Nixons, the Kennedys, the Clintons and the Bush seniors who have travelled and listened and learned. If you have the ambition to lead your nation and indirectly the free world – to combat the dangers of Russia, the threat of the Islamist extremist world, the challenge of Europe and the potential hegemony of China then there is nothing in your life so far that gives me the confidence that you can do it. And with John McCain in office well into his seventies and with faltering health I would worry about that…

Odd one was omitted? For Mr Briggs certainly knows that a similar rural “hinterland” had bred an unknown upon whom the presidency fell suddenly, on the death of his great predecessor:

…At the War Department … H. Merrill Pasco recalled, “There was sadness and great loss and just puzzlement as to what in the world we were going to do with this new president who really didn’t seem to us at that time to have any of the attributes of leadership. He had been sort of a picayunish, mean little investigator of excess spending in the Pentagon…”

Curiously, Mr Briggs doesn’t tell us from whence he gleaned his own detailed, personal knowledge of “US of A” leaders? Yet he must have missed how that “mean little investigator” was Harry Truman, who would become the driving force behind what became the Marshall Plan, named after his Secretary of State.

Nonetheless, we grasp his overriding point: Gov Palin has not to date been another globetrotting Judith Chalmers. Yet, in having over her lifetime thus avoided numerous, international long-haul, non-business flights, Gov Palin doesn’t even rate any anti-”climate change” plaudits? Ya just can’t win.

Assuming, however, for the sake of example, that Mr Briggs has also not been everywhere, like myself (and presumably, Gov Palin) he well-realizes also that even if he hasn’t, they are all actually out there. Yours truly has also discovered that if you ask those who have more intimate knowledge of places you may have not seen personally, they will generally be happy to confirm their existences.

Much as it was pointed out to Sen Obama that Auschwitz is in Poland. That’s the country east of Germany. Yours truly has heard also that they have running water, electricity, cars and internet access in both Brazil and Japan.

Will wonders never cease? As for living in Britain — “this island just off the west coast of Europe” — it is nothing at all like living in the U.S. So Mr Briggs needn’t worry: some of us out here are more than able to explain all of that to the ignorant, provincial Sarah Palin should she accidentally become President Palin.